Populism and Power

“I was a conservative populist before Donald Trump came down the escalator.” I wrote those words two years ago when I participated in a Quillette roundtable organised to debate whether or not the GOP should continue to embrace populism. I argued that it should, even though I had “become much more alert to the potential dangers of populism” by watching “much of the Trumpian base go down rabbit holes of election denial, vaccine paranoia, and Putin apologia in fits of blind rage.” But I still believe that a populist blend of “traditional social conservatism with old-fashioned New Deal liberalism,” which rejects the identitarian obsessions and growing economic inequality that have flourished under the modern culturally liberal establishment, is the sweet-spot for both the Republican Party and the country.

Should the GOP Continue to Embrace Populism?—A Roundtable

Editor’s note: With another presidential run by Trump in the offing, we asked two writers to reflect on the costs and benefits of populism. If you would like to contribute to this discussion, please send a response of ~800 words to [email protected]. I. For a prudent populism Dennis

QuilletteDennis Saffran, Bo Winegard, and Publius

In late 2022, my hope was that the populist base would come out of its conspiracist rabbit holes once Trump passed from the scene and wiser leaders emerged. Trump, of course, has not passed from the scene. But in J.D. Vance, he has chosen a vice-presidential running mate who at points during his political journey from NeverTrumper and admirer of Barack Obama to MAGA scourge of “childless cat ladies” seemed like he might become just such a leader of a politically mature populism.

In a speech titled “Beyond Libertarianism,” delivered at the first National Conservatism Conference in 2019, Vance condemned the Old Right’s free-market ideology as antithetical to the interests of children and families. His critique was devoid of the snarky hostility and the angry denunciations of “neocons” and other villains that would come later, and he even offered an olive branch of sorts to libertarians, calling Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom “one of the best books that I’ve ever read about conservative thought.” Libertarians, he conceded, “are not heartless” and “often recognise many of the same problems that we recognise,” but they lack the willingness to “use political power” to “solve those problems.”

Nine months later, Vance wrote an essay for the American Mind website of the Trumpian Claremont Institute under the provocative title “End the Globalization Gravy Train.” The tone was a bit harsher, but he still offered a thoughtful take on the influence that market-oriented corporate donors had exerted over the Republican Party and the conservative movement, even during the ostensibly populist Trump Administration:

[T]here are things you’re not allowed to say—about tax rates, the social value of financial engineering, and the size of government, especially—and things you must say—also about tax rates, the social value of financial engineering, and the size of government. Any departures from orthodoxy must be qualified—“this doesn’t mean we’re for big government”—if the check writers might see or hear.

While he inveighed against “globalism,” his discussion of foreign policy was confined to trade, and specifically to the naivety of conservative economists like Milton Friedman who “ignore[d] the costs” to American workers “of opening our markets to cheap consumer goods.” He further reproached these economists for having believed that greater economic freedom would lead to enhanced political freedom in China. On the contrary, he observed insightfully, under this failed approach, China had become “perhaps the most hypercapitalist regime in the world, but it has used its economic power to become even more politically authoritarian.” Notably, however, there were none of the denunciations of “endless wars” and American military action that have since become staples of Vance’s rhetoric and that of other New Right figures. So, just four years ago—and nineteen years after the first entry of US troops into Afghanistan—isolationism was not yet an important element of Vance’s populism. Or at least not one worth mentioning. 

As an economic and cultural populist who retains a commitment to the old Republican values of peace through strength and the Reaganite conception of America as a beacon of democracy, I find that iteration of J.D. Vance very appealing. But I have serious qualms about the current version, who told Steve Bannon in February 2022, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other”—a remark that National Review’s Dan McLaughlin compared to Joe Biden’s 1975 comment that he was “sick and tired of hearing about … our moral obligation” to the Vietnamese boat people.

Vance remains a leading opponent of aid to Ukraine, and an opponent of an active international role for the US in general. But there is no inherent connection between domestic populism and this kind of foreign-policy non-interventionism. Historically, populist figures have run the gamut from isolationists like Pat Buchanan to empire-builders like Teddy Roosevelt. Vance’s argument seems to be that since the concept of the “rules-based international order”—the system of postwar multinational institutions and agreements that protects independent states like Ukraine against aggression—has been “astroturfed” to justify the economic opening to China and other financial globalisation efforts, the entire project must be abandoned. But this is a logical leap so vast as to almost be a category error.

Even if I set aside Vance’s foreign-policy positions and focus instead on his economic and social views that seem to be broadly in sync with my own, I’m still leery, albeit for two contradictory reasons. First, his wildly shifting views suggest that he may not believe a word of what he says, and that he has adopted his populist persona solely for cynical political reasons. Second, that he is now a true believer in “postliberalism”—an amorphous and potentially dangerous and anti-democratic ideology that goes far beyond right-wing populism and even undermines it.

Does He Believe It?

A common view is that Vance’s ideological metamorphosis simply reflects the opportunism of an ambitious young politician as Trump and his MAGA movement came to dominate the Republican Party. David Frum, one of Vance’s former mentors, has written that:

The anti-populist conservative Vance persona of 2010–17 was well designed to please the individuals and constituencies that held power over his future at that juncture in his career. The angry-white-male persona of 2017–22 was as perfectly aimed at the Thiel-Trump-Tucker nexus as the earlier iteration had been to the Allen-Aspen-Atlantic one.

The rapidity of Vance’s transformation provides some evidence for this view. According to a transgender law-school friend (to whom “he delivered home-baked treats when they underwent top surgery”), he was far more liberal just ten years ago than simply being NeverTrump. In texts sent in 2014, he called Justice Antonin Scalia “a very shrill old man” for “his homophobic screeds,” said “I hate the police” in response to the law-enforcement killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (which the Obama Justice Department later found to be justified), and supported at least some form of racial reparations. It’s worth noting that one of the “childless cat ladies” he singled out in a 2021 interview was gay male transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg. How does one go, in just seven years, from calling Justice Scalia a shrill old homophobe to calling Pete Buttigieg a childless cat lady?

Two other bits of evidence provide additional support for the theory that Vance is a cynical phoney who’ll say anything to get ahead. First, in a surprisingly frank response to a Time interviewer just after launching his Ohio Senate bid, he acknowledged that “I need to just suck it up and support [Trump].”

The other, which is perhaps more telling, consists of two anecdotes he’s related of experiences at elite dinner events. The first, which he recounts in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, is about a recruiting dinner with a top law firm at a fancy restaurant while he was at Yale Law School. There, he was confronted with the utterly foreign choice between Sauvignon Blanc or Chardonnay, spat out his sparkling water because he didn’t realise it was carbonated, and faced a bewildering array of silverware at his place setting. (“Nine utensils? Why, I wondered, did I need three spoons? Why were there multiple butter knives?”) He had to excuse himself to make an emergency call to his more worldly girlfriend who explained what to use when. It’s a completely believable scene, since confirmed by his friend Rod Dreher, and one to which any lower-middle-class kid exposed to an elite environment can relate—as I, like Dreher, can attest from personal experience.

Review: Hillbilly Elegy — J.D. Vance

Through it he tells the story of hillbillies, impoverished immigrants who came from Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth century to settle in the American south.

QuilletteIrene Ogrizek

The film version of the book, released four years later in 2020, adds a new scene at the end of this story. After he returns to the table, Vance is asked by the snotty white-shoe lawyers how he deals with the “rednecks” when he goes back home to visit. “It must feel like you’re from another planet,” one of them tells him. Perhaps this is still believable, if we make allowances for Hollywood dramatisation. It’s not inconceivable, after all, that affluent white liberals would engage in this kind of thoughtless “microaggression” (as they would call it in any other context) when talking about rural white working people.

But there’s nothing micro about the plutocrat aggression in the second anecdote, which Vance told conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in June had led him to finally embrace MAGA. According to Vance, the following incident occurred at a business roundtable dinner in 2018:

I was seated next to the C.E.O. of one of the largest hotel chains in the world at dinner. He was almost a caricature of a business executive, complaining about how he was forced to pay his workers higher wages.

He said: “The labor market is super tight. What Trump has done at the border has completely forced me to change the way that I interact with my employees.” And then he pivoted to me: “Well, you understand this as well as anybody. These people just need to get off their asses, come to work and do their job. And now, because we can’t hire immigrants, or as many immigrants, we’ve got to hire these people at higher wages.”

A caricature indeed. You can practically see the guy twirling his moustache under his top hat. A Google search indicates that this was the first time Vance had ever told this story in public—just as he was trying to build a groundswell of MAGA support for the vice-presidential nomination. But even if it’s true, it occurred, in Vance’s telling, seven years after his similar experience with elite snobbery and bias at the law firm dinner in 2011. Yet he spent those intervening years as a moderate business-oriented Republican, venture capitalist, and bestselling author of a book favourably reviewed by the New York Times before he was supposedly shocked into Trumpism by the second experience. As Vance once said of funding for Ukraine, it “doesn’t add up.”

“Non-Conventional People”

Even so, I believe there is a lot more to Vance’s current persona than naked political opportunism. At the very least, what may have begun as cynicism seems to have developed into genuine zealotry. The best evidence of this is that Vance’s political sallies are often, to put it mildly, not very politic. The “childless cat ladies” crack was a good example, and I say this as someone who has probably used the phrase myself. It is, after all, a favourite of the very online New Right that Vance and I follow. And it is a humorous shorthand for an elite whose members seem to be disproportionately disinclined to have children. The problem is that most normal Americans—the working people for whom populists purport to speak—don’t consume very online New Right content and therefore aren’t in on the joke. Hearing the phrase for the first time from Vance, they’re less likely to think of the elites they resent and more likely to think of friends who are unable to conceive or a beloved spinster aunt.

An even more conspicuous example of Vance’s tendency to put ideological doctrine over electoral calculation was his determination to headline a recent event in Pennsylvania with the increasingly unhinged conspiracist Tucker Carlson. The joint appearance went ahead despite the recent controversy over Carlson’s sympathetic interview of a Hitler apologist and antisemite, whom Carlson lavishly praised as “the most important historian in the United States.” As National Review correspondent Jim Geraghty observed in an essay for the Washington Post:

No self-respecting pollster, focus-group conductor or campaign strategist would recommend the GOP nominee for vice president laugh it up with a Putin-adoring nutjob conspiracy theorist in a key swing state about six weeks before Election Day.

Most glaringly, Vance, more than Trump, persisted in promoting the claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pet cats even after it had been debunked. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance defiantly told CNN—echoing radical lawyer William Kunstler’s comment after the infamous Tawana Brawley rape hoax that, “It makes no difference whether the attack on Tawana really happened” since “a lot of young black women are treated the way she said she was treated.”

Vance has described himself as “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures,” and as the Carlson affair suggests, he has embraced some of the most ludicrous and alienating figures in this universe despite the political risk. A few years ago, Vance tweeted that Infowars founder Alex Jones “is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow.” He then doubled down on that assessment a few days later in a private talk. When those remarks were revealed by a left-wing media outlet after his nomination as Trump’s running mate, many conservative commentators assumed, as I did, that the line must have been intended as a joke at Maddow’s expense. But it wasn’t, as the transcript of the talk makes clear:

Now, some people said, “Well, JD, you’re just trolling.” Well, yeah, of course, I was just trolling. But that doesn’t mean what I said is in any way untrue. Look, I think there’s a not terrible chance that one of you is going to be sharing cellblock 12A in Premier Harris’s prison detention camp in a few years. If we’re going to all end up in that place, we might as well have a little fun while we get there. It’s okay to troll when you make and speak fundamental truths. But look, I do think that what I said was correct. Yeah, I was trolling; I was also speaking a truth.

Because look, if you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have, is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country. But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too. Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.   

In addition to being a 9/11 truther, Jones has repeatedly claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in which twenty young children were murdered, was a “hoax” and that the victims were “child actors.” This unconscionable lie (or delusion) led Jones’s followers to harass grieving parents for years. While Newtown is a fairly upmarket town (though not as upmarket as Vance’s current neighbourhoods), many school-shooting locales are rural and blue collar, including the site of the most recent carnage in Winder, Georgia. There is nothing populist about defending Alex Jones.

Alex Jones Was Victimized by One Oligopoly. But He Perpetuated Another

We must be the protectors of our own free speech, and habitually speak out not just against the tech giants, but also against populist gurus.

QuilletteGurwinder Bhogal

But Vance not only defended Jones, he also proceeded to offer a broader defence of paranoid conspiracists like him, romanticising them as “non-conventional people”:

[T]he second criticism that I get is, well, [Alex Jones is] a crazy conspiracist, right? He doesn’t believe that 9/11 actually happened or he believed 9/11 was an inside job. And look, I understand this desire to not be called terrible names. It’s like, yeah, okay, this person believes crazy things. But I bet if you’re being honest with yourself, every single person in this room believes at least something that’s a little crazy, right? I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now. Even though, of course, they participate in it without knowing about it. But that’s a separate matter.

But ladies and gentlemen, the most important truths often come from people who are crazy 60% of the time, but they’re right 40% of the time. I don’t know Elon Musk very well. I know him a little bit. I’ve had a couple of private conversations with him. Elon Musk believes some crazy stuff. I’m very close friends with Peter Thiel. I think Peter Thiel is one of the most important sources of non-conventional truth in our society. Peter Thiel believes some things that are considered crazy by opinion makers. We have to get away from this weird tension that we feel in our chest when somebody says, “This person believes something crazy. Therefore, you must denounce them.”

“Believing crazy things,” Vance added, “is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected. Believing important truths should be the mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy things on the side, that’s fine. We need to be okay with non-conventional people.”

The analogy Vance drew between his own belief in the Devil (a view shared by some 60 percent of the US public) and Jones’s conspiracy theories about 9/11 and Sandy Hook is about as contemptuous of religious faith and believers as anything ever said by the most elitist secular liberal. He also advanced a “no enemies to the right” justification for inclusively welcoming figures like Jones as “part of our movement.” This also seems to explain his refusal to criticise Carlson, whom he described in the same talk as “one of the most important leaders” in the conservative movement:

A lot of the things that are ultimately gonna get revealed as truths are going to be advocated originally by crazy people. Doesn’t mean you have to be best friends with them. Doesn’t mean you have to defend their craziest views. But by all means, if this movement is going to survive, we need to speak for truth. And that means standing up for non-conventional people, even when they sometimes say things that we disagree with.

[...]

Don’t take the bait that disconnects us from our own voters and our own people. Just because you don’t always agree with them, just because they don’t talk the way that you talk, they are our people. And if this movement exists for any reason, it’s to defend them, to advance their interest, and to make sure that they can live a good life in this country too.

As if to illustrate the point, Vance recently wrote a favourable blurb for a book by Jack Posobiec, a right-wing crank best known for circulating and promoting the 2016 “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory that Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington DC pizza parlour.

Postliberalism

The common thread in these “weird, right-wing subcultures” is that they are all part of the “postliberal Right,” a philosophical movement with which Vance explicitly identifies. A note on terminology is important here. “Liberalism” has a very different meaning in political theory than it does in ordinary political discourse. As Professor James Patterson has recently written: “While most Americans know the term ‘liberalism’ as a reference to a left-of-center ideology common among Democrats, the other common use is in reference to a political theory that prioritizes individual rights as a source of political authority and human flourishing,” and that “entails liberty of conscience, representative government,” the rule of law under a written constitution, and a market economy. Thus, as Patterson notes, many conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan have traditionally called themselves “classical liberals.”

Of course, the distinction can get a bit confusing since the creation of expansive and even bizarre new individual rights unimagined by the founders has been at the heart of the politically correct distortions of modern political liberalism—as has our therapeutic culture’s perversion of “human flourishing” into “self-actualisation.” But the “individual rights” strand of classical liberalism isn’t about that; it’s about the basics of human liberty: 1776 and all that stuff; 1689 and all that stuff; 1215 and all that stuff. This includes the freedom of speech and religion crucial for people of traditional religious faith who dissent from secular liberal orthodoxy. And “human flourishing” is about the pursuit of happiness, not “Free to Be... You and Me.”

The key postliberal figures who have influenced Vance’s thinking include Curtis Yarvin—the neoreactionary blogger formerly known as Mencius Moldbug, who supports a form of monarchism or dictatorship—and perhaps its most serious exponent, Notre Dame political philosopher and self-described revolutionary Patrick Deneen. Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed was praised by commentators across the political spectrum, including Barack Obama. It traced the excesses of modern progressivism to the ideals of classical liberalism, arguing that classical liberalism’s “focus on individualism, secularism and free market economics eroded the communal bases of American life—namely the nuclear family, shared religious faith and local economies.” This process, Deneen contends, was what produced “widening material inequality.” In that regard—and especially to the extent that Deneen focused on the inherent dangers of the “economic liberty” strand of classical liberalism rather than its individual political rights strand—he merely rehashed a critique that had been made forty years earlier by the neoconservatives who are now so despised by the New Right—most notably Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and Irving Kristol in Two Cheers for Capitalism.

In his 2023 book Regime Change, however, Deneen took “a more radical approach,” arguing “for a ‘peaceful’ revolution to replace liberalism with a ‘postliberal order’ grounded in the promotion of conservative and religious values rather than the protection of individual rights.” But, as the author of a lengthy profile of Deneen noted last year, his writing can be “maddeningly vague” and “he is frustratingly coy about what ‘regime change’ actually entails or how it will unfold.” In a New York Times interview with Ezra Klein, Deneen repeatedly dodged the question of “what choices you think we have today that we should have less of.”

America Doesn’t Need Regime Change

Patrick Deneen has written a book that reproduces and encourages a form of self-deception that’s pervasive in the United States on the populist Right.

QuilletteDamon Linker

Deneen is sometimes described as a communitarian, a political philosophy that, his Politico profile says, “emphasizes the shared norms and values that bind individuals into political communities.” Like conservative populism, communitarianism often mixes social conservatism and economic interventionism policies in support of community values. Why Liberalism Failed clearly fits that framework. As Professor Graedon H. Zorzi suggested in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in July, the postliberalism that Deneen and Vance espouse could be seen “as an extension of … communitarianism.”

I’m not sure, though—at least not without more specifics from both of them. During the late 1990s, I ran a communitarian-oriented centre-right organisation that styled itself the “common-sense counter to the ACLU.” And unlike Deneen (or Vance, for that matter), we were very clear about which purported “rights” we wanted to limit, and which we did not. We challenged the absurd expansion of protections for criminal defendants and other bizarre new individual-rights claims that threatened community safety and quality of life. But we did not want to interfere with bedrock First Amendment protections for speech and religion.

So, if postliberalism is just communitarianism, then why don’t postliberals just call it that? As Zorzi asks in his WSJ op-ed, “Why would Mr. Vance and others adopt the term ‘postliberal’” instead? Given the presence in the postliberal orbit of Catholic integralists who genuinely support a kind of theocracy, not to mention ideologically fringe but politically influential figures like the Nazi-curious Carlson, this ought to be a cause for concern. And it’s a cause for political concern for those of us sympathetic to right-wing populism. As David Shor, the progressive but heterodox-enough-to-be-cancelled pollster and analyst has noted, the public in general and Trump voters in particular support a form of communitarian populism including some limits on abortion rights, but they “don’t want to live in a Catholic dictatorship.”

Some of the indications that Vance has given about his concept of postliberalism are, like his refusal to criticise Carlson, not reassuring. He has said that “we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” What would this entail exactly? The Left has unfairly attacked Vance for saying that he would advise Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people” (an idea he credits to Yarvin). Whatever one thinks of this as policy, the tradeoff between the claimed integrity and professionalism of a civil service and the democratic accountability of a spoils system is a perennial political issue. But what Vance said next is indeed chilling: “Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” This would be open defiance of the rule of law, the mainstay of classical liberalism.

A seemingly unrelated news story is depressingly relevant on this point. Admissions data from Yale University and several other elite schools suggest that many of them may be brazenly defying last year’s Supreme Court ruling banning racial preferences. (Yale has significantly decreased its Asian-American acceptance rate, thereby thumbing its nose not only at the Court but also at the minority group that challenged the preferences regime in the first place.) Chief Justice Roberts has made his ruling; now let him enforce it. American voters, in other words, face a dismal choice in November between the postliberalism of the New Right and the postliberalism of the establishment. We need a rational democratic right-wing populism as an alternative to both.